By David Romas

The students and dancers of the Maggie Allesee Department of Dance at Wayne State University benefited tremendously from the residency of Doug Elkins, Bessie Award-winning artistic director of the Doug Elkins Dance Company, January 20-30, 2003. While at Wayne State, Elkins taught lessons in choreography and intermediate and advanced modern dance and also trained twelve members of the WSU Dance Company to perform a piece of his own creation titled "Narcoleptic Lovers." Accompanying Elkins to WSU was dancer/choreographer Brian Gaggiano, who is a member of Doug Elkins Dance and who served as rehearsal director as the WSU Dancers learned "Narcoleptic Lovers."

"Narcoleptic Lovers" will be performed by the WSU Dance Company as part of their 74th annual spring dance concert, Dancing Beyond, to take place March21 and 22, 8 p.m., at Wayne State's Bonstelle Theatre. "Narcoleptic Lovers" is a lengthy piece, divided into several suites, about coming to terms with one's past intimate relationships and former lovers. Elkins describes his creation as loosely autobiographical and "a funky version of 'remembrance of things past.'" He says it deals with that point in some intimate relationships "when you fall asleep in the relationship, when you lose sight of what excited you back when it was fresh and new." "Narcoleptic Lovers" is staged with eight dancers (four more serve as understudies), makes use of a broad variety of music - from Mozart to UK-based hip-hop group Urban Species to spoken word samples from Lenny Bruce - and will be costumed for the spring dance concert by WSU Theatre professor of costuming Mary Copenhagen.

Doug Elkins maintains a busy teaching and touring schedule, with recent travels to London and Amsterdam. In 2002, he choreographed a new production of Peter and The Wolf for the In The Wings company of Belgium and worked on a production of City for the annual Holland Festival. Other recent projects include L'Universe for The Flying Karamazov Brothers, now touring throughout the United States, and a production of A Dream Play for the Cleveland Play House. Elkins is a recipient of commissions and awards from the NEA, National Performance Network, Dance Magazine Foundation, Metropolitan Life/American Dance Festival, the Hartford Foundation, Arts International and The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. He is a 1994 recipient of the Brandeis University Award in Dance and a 1997 recipient of the Bessie Award, a pinnacle honor in the field of dance. In the citation on his Bessie Award, Elkins is credited for "walking the walk as well as talking the talk, not to mention utterly tanking what's left of post-modernist pretension, all the while fashioning a singular provocative poetics of dancing." The Maggie Allesee Department of Dance at Wayne State University is proud to have hosted this excellent artist.